[Bug-gnubg] New book by Paul Magriel (?)

[Øystein Johansen]

Hi all!

I just spoke to a friend of mine, Hanna Nilsson, on the phone. She's a 
little jet-set of the backgammon scene, and she record matches for the 
real champions, like Magriel, Tardieu and Kent Goulding. She wanted to 
say that Paul Magriel is working on a new book, and he wants to do 
rollouts whith GNU Backgammon, and maybe compare these rollouts with 
rollouts from other bots.

My mind usually have a positive setting, and this conversation was no 
exeption. Cool! GNU Backgammon in printed book, by a world class player.

She also told me that Paul Magriel doesn't have a permanent address 
these days, so all communication must go through her at the moment. Paul 
is a unexperienced computer user and he therfore needs some assistance. 
I guess Hanna can learn the basics from the Alberts tutorial [1] and 
Mortens Danish "GNU Backgammon for dummies" [2].

Also, she asked for computer power to perform rollous, and I guess we're 
able to help them with that. Hold your computers ready. (Ian? Are you 
ready?)

I also mentioned the PDF, PostScript and LaTeX exports in GNU 
Backgammon. We all know that these features isn't fully completed yet, 
and that publishing a book from these formats are not recommended yet, 
but if we can do some development on these things the next weeks or 
mounts, (based on input from Paul, Kit, Bill and other authors), I guess 
we can make a system that's capable of producing real professional books 
and documents. She said that she'll mention this features to the authors.

I'll build a new installation archive for windows the next days for 
Hanna and Paul to check out. Jon, Nardy, Holger: is there anything I 
should add registers or anything else?

Meanwhile, I guess you Hanna, can take a look at the current 
installation archive for windows [3]. Are you on a dial up line, Hanna? 
Or do you have a ADSL connection?

I also like to boast about the strength of the program, which you may 
pass on to Paul.

Micheal Depreli runned a long set of maoney games between GNU Backgammon 
0.12(?) and Snowie 3.2. He analysed each game and rolled out all 
positions where any of the bots disagreed in any move. The bots used 
was: Snowie 3.2 (S3), Snowie 4 (S4), JellyFish (J), GNU Backgammon 0.12 
(G12), GNU Backgammon 0.13 (G13), GNU Backgammon 0.14 (G14). The result 
of his analysis was posted to GammOnLine. Results there [4], or the 
posting to rec.games.backgammon [5].

Also a set of 5000 money games was set up between GNU Backgammon 0.13 
and JellyFish. The results was that GNU Backgammon 0.13 won 0.12pts pr. 
game against JellyFish. (Was luck ever calculated and evaluated for this 
set?) Search in rec.games.backgammon for the discussion and results [6].

Albert Silver have also run a series of 7-point matches agains Snowie4. 
(That was before the latest 0.14 net). Check this thread [7] in the 
mailing list archive. Jørn did a luck analysis of Alberts matches and 
concludes in this posting [8].

Best regards,
-Øystein

Links:
[1] http://www.bkgm.com/gnu/AllAboutGNU.html
[2] http://home1.stofanet.dk/aabgk/gnubg4dummies.html
[3] http://www.gnubg.org/downloads/windows/
[4] http://www.gammonline.com/members/board/config.cgi?read=60968
[5] 
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl3357767960d&dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&selm=f9846eb9.0306231441.3f641af4%40posting.google.com
[6] 
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?group=rec.games.backgammon
[7] http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnubg/2003-06/msg00096.html
[8] 
http://groups.google.com/address@hidden